Prism Staff (name pending)

[Arcon]

Am I the only one who absolutely couldn't care less about any additional effects? So what if you need a Terra's and an Arka IV (and possibly a Pluto's) in addition to that, it would still cut the staves you need to carry by a lot.

Personally, I'm disappointed as well. This staff should have been released years ago. Sure, there's still some people out there who'd benefit from it, but I'd have to gimp my playstyle extremely to get a use out of this. I really don't get SE's reasoning behind this, why do they release this after making items with Affinity +6 on them? I hate how afraid they are of overpowering things that they only shell out half assed junk like this. But whatever, I guess it's a tiny step in the right direction.

Firstly, if there is a prism staff, please make sure that it is Magic Affinity Damage as opposed to Magic Attack Bonus [..]

I'm pretty sure it's just the wording. Magic Affinity, to players' current knowledge consists of three parts, damage, accuracy and perpetuation cost. I'd see no reason why they'd add another aspect to it at this point in time, especially if they're trying to combine staves that affect those three parts in particular. It would be pretty pointless if it was MAB instead of damage affinity.

(And apparently the Magian staves work slightly differently from the level 51 staves, but someone far mathier than I would have to explain that.)

That's not about math, really. The effects are applied seperately, but they're still the same effects using the same formulas. One of them adds to the elemental bonus from certain Atma (trial staves), while the other is multiplied afterwards (Lv51 elemental staves), that's the only way we can even tell the difference. But I can't think of any non-Atma situation where there would be a difference. They're both subject to all other rules, only they take two seperate steps in the evaluation chain, which leads to believe that they're considered different effects. Still has virtually no effect on the end-user.